


Deanamajig*

by Elemental1025



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Ficlet, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-04
Updated: 2012-11-04
Packaged: 2017-11-17 08:25:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/549557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elemental1025/pseuds/Elemental1025
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the first SPN fic I ever wrote and egad that was a long time ago.  The boys were so young then!  This came out of a discussion on TWoP about Dean's talent for making things, like an EMF meter out of an old walkman.  I am resisting the urge to edit it, or just rewrite it all together so it is what it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deanamajig*

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to Live Journal April 16, 2006
> 
> *term coined by VeronicaSpeedwell on TWoP
> 
> Not mine, I just play with them and return them unharmed.

Peering at himself in the misted bathroom mirror, Sam decided he didn't _look_ crazy.  
  
But after having just spent 16 hours driving from Baton Rouge to some godforsaken hole in the middle of the Oklahoma panhandle chasing a lead that had turned out to be nothing more than a malicious college prank, Sam was ready to start breaking things.  
  
They had decided not to stay in Loserville, OK. If they had, some local frat boy wannabes might have found themselves missing a few teeth -- and maybe a few other parts -- so instead they had gotten back in the car to find a motel in another town.  
  
Sam had _thought_ they were only going as far as the next town big enough to have a motel, because he really needed to spend some quality time _not_ in the Impala. But for some reason that Dean had inexplicably chosen not to fill him in on, they had driven another 133 miles before stopping at this lovely metropolis that Sam didn’t even know the name of.  
  
Somewhere between mile post 116 and 117 though, Sam had calmly ejected Dean’s “Dark Side of the Moon” cassette - which Dean had been playing on a continuous loop for the previous _three hours_ \- and tossed it out the window. And after giving Sam a look that would have frozen a fire demon in its tracks, Dean hadn’t spoken a word to him since.  
  
Once they found a room and settled in, Sam had commandeered the bathroom and had purposely stayed in the shower longer than was strictly necessary just to get some space, but he couldn’t hide in the bathroom any longer. Opening the door with caution, he scanned the room for his brother.  
  
He was sitting with his back to the room over near the window, seemingly engrossed in whatever was spread out in front of him on the table, and didn't appear to have even noticed the bathroom door open.  
  
Thinking for once their dad’s training might have had some merit, Sam moved warily to the bed, stretched out his full length and then casually reached for the TV remote like he didn’t have a care in the world. So far, so good.  
  
He knew there wouldn’t be much to choose from as far as channels went, not in this town that was at the back end of nowhere, but anything would be better than this chilly silence. Unfortunately, silence was all he continued to get as he repeatedly pressed the Power button on the remote with no effect.  
  
Great.  
  
After popping the back open to make sure the batteries were set properly he tried again.  
  
Still no luck.  
  
It had been working fine before he got in the shower. Oddly though, it seemed to feel a lot lighter now than it had when he'd handled it before. Curious, he picked up his pocket knife and unscrewed the back, only to find that most of the guts were just… missing.  
  
It definitely had _not_ been like that before he’d gotten in the shower.  
  
“Dean, what did you do to the remote?” Try as he might, he couldn’t keep the accusing tone out of his voice.  
  
Dean didn’t even turn around, and Sam was only just able to catch the muttered response. “I needed the infrared signal.”  
  
Sam let out a slow breath through his nose, “So you cannibalized the motel TV remote?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
His voice rose a notch. “And how are we supposed to use the TV?”  
  
“I could be wrong, but if you look, there might be a button on the set that turns it on.” Dean’s reply was infuriatingly bland.  
  
“What about changing channels?” He knew he sounded like a bratty 12-year old but he just didn’t care.  
  
“I’m sure there’s a button on there for that too.”  
  
“But what if I don’t _want_ to have to get up every two seconds to change it?” Sometimes Sam really hated his brother.  
  
“Dude, if all you want to do is channel surf, the laptop’s over there, you can hook in through the phone line. Type in tvguide.com. and that will tell you everything you want to know.” Exasperation had finally reached his brother’s voice too, “Or, here’s an idea, maybe you could read?”  
  
Then, before Sam could find something appropriate to throw at him, and in that quicksilver way that never ceased to catch Sam off guard, the irritated tone was gone from his brother’s voice and it softly turned into something else entirely, “You’re always saying you don’t have any time to just read for fun anymore.”  
  
That stopped him in his tracks, and suddenly Sam remembered something he’d thought odd but hadn’t paid much attention to on the way in. Dean had passed right by two cheaper motels, the kind they invariably ended up staying at, and instead drove into town and pulled into the lot of a nicer place that just happened to be right across the street from the town’s only library.  
  
“Yeah, I could do that,” Sam said slowly, “especially since the library is right across the street.” Sam could feel the tension magically draining out of his shoulders.  
  
“Is it? Cool.”  
  
And okay yeah, sometimes he really loved his dorky brother too.  
  
Now that he wasn’t trying to imagine ways to make his brother squeal like a pig, Sam’s curiosity finally got the better of him. Dean’s attention hadn’t wavered once during their ‘discussion’ from whatever the box-like contraption was he had in front of him, but from his vantage point, Sam couldn’t tell what it was.  
  
“What is that?”  
  
A decidedly distracted reply came after the barest of hesitations. “It isn’t really anything unless it ends up working.” Sam’s curiosity was further piqued.  
  
“Okay, what is it supposed to be?”  
  
“I’ll let you know when I figure out what to call it.”  
  
Sam closed his eyes and then looked up to the ceiling. Sometimes getting a straight answer out of Dean required the patience of a saint. But in a way, it was also like a game that required finesse, and Sam suddenly found himself in the mood to play.  
  
He nonchalantly got up off the bed and approached the table eyeing the spread of various arcane looking electronic parts. “Where did you get all this from?”  
  
Dean shrugged, “Here and there. You’d be surprised what you can find in the free box at the junk store.”  
  
Sam picked up something that looked vaguely like it used to be part of a graphic equalizer. “Please don’t tell me you’re making some sort of ham radio.”  
  
Dean sighed dramatically and retrieved the part from Sam’s hand, placed it back very precisely where Sam had picked it up from, and then went back to his soldering.  
  
Sam grinned at his brother’s OCD tendencies, but then it occurred to him that all the parts on the table looked almost like the set up of a schematic.  
  
“You must have some idea what you’re trying to accomplish here other than just making up an excuse to play with the soldering gun.”  
  
That got a smirk, but Dean still didn’t look up or stop what he’s doing. “It’s kinda sorta supposed to be something along the lines of a portable harmonic resonator.”  
  
“’Kinda sorta’? Sam said, still grinning as he sat down in the other chair. “Don’t they make those already?”  
  
Dean snorted, “Not like this, this has… modifications. And do you have any idea how much those things cost anyway? I’d have to hustle pool for like a _year_.” His tone was confident, “This’ll work.”  
  
Sam had little doubt that it would, but he still wasn’t seeing the application, “Okay, but work for what?”  
  
Dean just shrugged, “Could work for a lot of things. We’d just need to figure out the settings.”  
  
He almost fell for it. Almost. He was being deflected and damned if Dean wasn’t using Sam’s own natural inclination for theorizing against him. He even had his mouth open to ask about the settings, which would have given Dean the opening he was angling for to start spewing all the technical stuff he knew Sam couldn’t follow.  
  
And which would have effectively ended the conversation and had him escaping out the door to the aforementioned library, but he recognized the ploy in time to stop himself. So instead, ignoring the tantalizing details of ‘how’, he went back to his original question. “You have a specific something in mind?”  
  
That finally earned him eye contact but his brother’s expression wasn’t one he could read.  
  
“Guy I know sent me some readings for something he ran across. I’m using that to calibrate this thing.” Dean said it a little too casually.  
  
Sam raised his eyebrows. He was being deflected again, but this tangent was a _lot_ more tempting to take. If you knew what to listen for, Dean was very precise about what he said. And in one sentence, Dean had dangled an invitation to ask about three things Sam had been intensely curious about since he’d come back into the family business, but hadn’t yet had any luck getting Dean to talk about.  
  
But that just made him all the more determined to get an answer to his original question.  
  
“What did this guy think he’d run into and why would he think you’d be interested?” Sam tried to keep his voice as neutral as possible, but when Dean gave him a regretful look, put the tools down and slowly walked over to the still warm coffee pot, he knew he hadn’t been successful.  
  
After the eternity it took for Dean to finish with the coffee, he finally answered. “He thought he’d run into a rawhead, and he thought I’d be interested because I asked.”  
  
Sam nodded. After the look he’d gotten that was what he figured. And from the look he was still getting from Dean, Sam figured _he_ probably looked rather pale, because when his brother had said the words, he’d literally felt the blood drain out of his head.  
  
He should have expected this though. Dean didn’t like anything evil having even a perceived advantage, and while the supped-up stun gun had worked against the rawhead they’d encountered, it was still problematic to use in practice because you had to juice it up so much for it to be effective.  
  
Of course he’d want to find another, safer way to deal with them. That was just Dean. Never mind that going after one of those things had nearly killed him.  
  
Sam picked absently at a gouge in the edge of the table. He knew his fears weren’t entirely rational, but there were still a lot of things about that particular two-week period he’d really rather not think about ever again, and the rawhead was one of them.  
  
Unfortunately things like that usually had a way of coming back and biting you in the ass anyway, and it occurred to him that maybe doing this was part of Dean’s way of dealing with some of those issues that neither of them had any intention of ever talking about.  
  
“So how is this supposed to work? You said the guy sent you readings?” Whatever misgivings he had, he wasn’t going to let them stop him from helping if he could, “What kind of readings?”  
  
“Mostly some weird sound wave stuff that he’s pretty sure wasn’t part of what they were actually there to research. Subsonic so it was only showing up on the equipment and nobody else was paying much attention to it, too much else going on. It didn’t seem to be having any effect on anyone, but there were only adults around, no kids, and they were only getting the readings at certain times.”  
  
Sam shook his head, “But why does he think it was a rawhead?”  
  
“He saw it.” Dean was matter-of-fact. “Briefly. But it took off and now the weird readings have stopped. And it makes sense, those things are strong as an ox and quick but they’re not that smart or that fast, so there has to be another reason why none of their victims ever even _try_ to get away. The wave displacement they picked up...”  
  
Sam held up his hand, “Yeah yeah yeah, okay… I’ll take your word for it. But what you’re saying is that if it _is_ using some sort of, what… subsonic wave in order to exert mental control over its victims? You’re thinking this gadget will cancel it out kind of like noise canceling headphones do? But what then? Do you think this could disable it if you can throw enough feedback at it in the right wave range?”  
  
“Yeah. Well, maybe. Among other things.”  
  
“Way to be definitive, dude,” Sam teased lightly, trying to keep his mind focused on the logistics and nothing else, “but we’d still need to figure out a way to actually kill it. Fire doesn’t work, bullets don’t work. Maybe we could figure out a way to cut its head off, but I’m thinking it might not just sit calmly and let us do that, even if we can disable it somehow.”  
  
“One thing at a time, grasshopper,” Dean smiled enigmatically. “And hey, weren’t you going to go commune with the other geeks over at the library? We’re not going to be here that long so you might as well take advantage of that while you can.”  
  
Which meant Dean was done sharing, which was okay. The atmosphere had warmed up considerably from what it was half an hour ago. But he did have one question he still wanted to ask, “What did you have to strip the TV remote for?”  
  
Dean looked a little sheepish, “Well, I thought it would be cool if we could set if off from a distance, depending on what kind of range it has.”  
  
Sam nodded. That would be cool, actually. “Then we just need to find your friend’s rawhead so you can test it out.”  
  
  
  
  
** _Two weeks later_ **  
  
Sitting in the passenger seat of the Impala, Sam’s brows were furrowed, “Did you know it was going to do that?”  
  
“That what was gonna do what?” Dean didn’t take his eyes off the road.  
  
“Dude, don’t even try that, you know exactly what I’m talking about.”  
  
Dean shot a look at Sam like he had grown another head, “Of course I didn’t.”  
  
It sounded convincing, but in retrospect it really made no sense at all. “So, you just decided to build a homemade harmonic resonator-ish like… _thing_ on a whim because you thought it might give the thing a headache?”  
  
“Yeah, kinda.”  
  
“And you didn’t have any idea what it was actually going to do.”  
  
“No.”  
  
“I don’t believe you.” Sam muttered peevishly.  
  
“Sam I swear, I didn’t.”  
  
Sam’s only response was to stare moodily back at his brother, who he could tell was trying desperately to keep a straight face. And that only made Sam want to smack him even more.  
  
Finally Dean couldn’t contain his grin any longer, “You’ve gotta admit though, that was pretty cool, wasn’t it? The way the thing’s head just exploded like that?”  
  
Sam wanted to stay annoyed, he really did, but his brother’s obvious glee was just too infectious and in spite of himself, he found he just couldn’t keep from matching his brother’s grin. Letting out a long suffering and exasperated sigh he agreed, “Yeah that was pretty cool. Pretty damn _messy_ ,” he added tersely since he was _still_ finding bits of sticky greenish gunk in his hair, “but pretty cool.”  
  
“Well, next time you’ll know to stand farther back.”  
  
“Dean next time, I get to push the button.”  
  
“No way, dude. My toy. You want one, you can build your own.”  
  
Sam considered his options.  
  
“What if I find you another “Dark Side of the Moon” cassette?”  
  
Dean cocked his head slightly and then shot Sam another sideways glance, “Seriously?”  
  
“Seriously.” Even if he had to scour every used music store in the state of Texas to find one.  
  
“Okay. But you have to let me play it while _you’re_ driving.”  
  
Sam settled back and slouched in the seat comfortably, “Deal.”


End file.
